Experiential apologetics seeks to persuade a listener of the truth of Christianity by means of relating one or multiple personal experiences. This form of evangelism is dangerous, faulty, and cannot survive an intellectual examination.
Before I proceed, allow me to remind my readers that people claim they have had experiences which prove the existence of alien life, the simulation hypothesis, and other unverifiable beliefs. I am not saying that extraterrestrial life does not exist or that the simulation hypothesis is false, I am merely showing that the experiences of a person, even if true, cannot prove either the experience or the conclusion to the hearer.
Experiential apologetics is the ultimate copout and can undeniably be used to argue for whatever religion or theological beliefs the one appealing to his or her experience is defending. Almost every religious group in existence can appeal to subjective mystical experiences as justification for belief in their particular organized or informal theological position. Actually, the Mormon book Doctrines and Covenants directly confesses that subjective feelings will verify Mormonism if someone investigating its truth prays about the matter.
--Doctrines and Covenants 9:8--"But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must ask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall burn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right [1]."
No one can justify believing in God for this reason. Anyone who cites this or anything resembling it as proof of God's existence commits a major use of the anecdotal fallacy. And people who think they have encountered an emotional religious experience with God must question if they can trust anything they felt, while assuming absolutely nothing about the nature, origins, or meaning of the experience. No one can justify believing in God's existence on such pathetic grounds. From a rational perspective it becomes apparent that experiences of this type can never be verified, for they are by definition subjective events that honestly might have only occurred in the mind of the claimant.
Christians must avoid experiential apologetics not only because it is rationally unjustifiable and because God commands us to honor and employ reason, but because it will (and rightly so) have no effect whatsoever on many skeptics and unbelievers except to perhaps lead to a bout of appropriate laughter from them. Do not expect to make significant progress with true pursuers of truth when you rely on evidences as weak as this. Theistic rationalism does not merely discourage such argumentation but is by definition intrinsically hostile towards it.
Obviously, I'm no empiricist. I'm a rationalist, clearly, hence the title of my blog, and I did not assume rationalism to be true because I find it appealing or because I arbitrarily decided to or because I felt like believing in it. I'm a rationalist simply because it is true, nothing more.
Final note: I never argued that God cannot provide people with experiential encounters with himself or that everyone who claims to have such experiences is delusional or lying. I myself can relate to these experiences [2] but I will never use them in my evangelism or apologetics and I could never use them as a foundation or rational proof for my worldview. Instead, all I proved here was that experiential apologetics does not prove anything, is intellectually unjustifiable, and offers no epistemological value. As an epistemic theory it stands refuted and useless.
[1]. https://www.lds.org/scriptures/dc-testament/dc/9.8?lang=eng
[2]. http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/08/my-personal-story-part-1-start-of.html
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